Tag: Zend

We were excited when we read about the Simple Cloud API from Zend. An interoperable Cloud API accessible via PHP was something we were keen to see if we could integrate it’s storage API with our own Multi-Cloud API which is based on REST but which has different language examples and bindings, including PHP.

After examining the SimpleCloud API it is clear to us that the storage API piece, as is, was limited compared to our own multi-cloud storage API whose aim is to provide an abstraction layer with file system functionality coupled with service functionality, such as the ability to backup email, backup contacts from social clouds, provide cloud sync and failover capabilities, encryption facilities etc. The Simple Cloud API is focused on providing access to clouds, with simple Create, Read, Delete functionality, and does not necessarily abstract the way the clouds are accessed or manipulated.

There are two ways in which we could integrate with Zend. We could take advantage of their libraries to add support for clouds supported by the SimpleCloud API that we do not support, or we could integrate in a way that enables the SimpleCloud API to take advantage of the 10 plus clouds we support, by providing our own SimpleCloud SMEStorage plug-in.

It looks as there will be a fair bit of work to take advantage of the SimpleCloud API in our architecture. The Current version of the SimpleCloud API doesn’t allow the streaming downloading of files. This would require us to create a set of classes that will extend the Simple Cloud classes and would have new methods related to streaming downloading and other methods that will return some information to use with streaming upload. There are other issues also, such as limitations on listing all buckets in S3. It only works with the bucket that the user provides in the settings.

Despite all of this the SImpleCloud API will be here to stay so we intend to move forward with our integration to it, and it is on our roadmap.